Beginnings
by Badr
Summary: Part-novelization of the first scenes of Identity, part-speculative exploring the time Bourne spent on the fishing boat. How did he spend the first few days or weeks getting to know himself again? Draws some inspiration from the book.
1. Chapter 1

_Mediterranean Sea  
60 miles south of Marseilles_

"You lose again, Pietro," Giovanni laughed, tossing his cards down onto the table with obvious satisfaction. "You know what that means," he said, gesturing to the waste bin in the corner.

"Yeah, yeah," Pietro grumbled good-naturedly. "I should know by now not to play with crooks like you."

His companions roared in protest as he shrugged on his coat and pushed his glasses more firmly onto the bridge of his nose. His smile faded when he turned to climb the ladder up to the deck; the hard grey sky flashed with lightning and the rain was driving down on the ocean more fiercely than before. His glasses would be ruined in that mess, he realized ruefully.

Above the cozy, smoky card room the storm's effect on the little boat was much more evident. It threw him against the walls of the inner corridor, and the deck was dark and slick with rainwater; his feet could not quite find adequate purchase as he struggled toward the biting open air.

Pausing briefly to pull his hood over his head, Pietro bent his body into the wind and strode as quickly as possible to the stern. He meant to stay only as long as it took to toss the bin's contents into the roiling water, but then something caught his eye and he stood for a long moment, squinting into the distance. What the hell was that? Like a star, or a tiny spark of lightning blinking, blinking, blinking amid the churning surf.

And then he knew, and, feet sliding every which way beneath him, he scrambled back to the warm card room.

"A man," he spluttered, gesturing upward, outward. His crewmates went silent at the sight of him, gasping and dripping almost as much water as the storm outside. "There's a man—a body in the ocean."

There was one more fleeting instant of stillness, and then everyone moved at once, cards flung aside, chairs scraped harshly against the rough wooden floor, cigarettes stubbed out with hasty fingers.

Giancarlo, the boat's navigator and makeshift doctor, took charge of the effort to drag the body from the clinging waves, shouting instructions and encouragement to the rest of the straining, grunting crew. Finally the body slithered up and over the side, looking absurdly similar to that day's catch; Giancarlo might have laughed, except now they had a dead body on board and nothing to do with it.

Wiping his hands off in disgust, Sergio spat, succinctly, "What a mess."

"You've never seen a dead man before?" someone else quipped, but everyone knew what Sergio meant. The authorities would have to be notified, and where could they store a body without it rotting on them? The fishing trip would have to be cut short, and with it went most of their profit.

And then, suddenly, one of the corpse's hands twitched, and the circle of men grouped around him shrank back in horror. A few murmured prayers; someone hissed a curse; one or two simply stared, eyes wide and dark in chalk-white faces.

"He's still alive," Giancarlo shouted over the storm. "We have to get him belowdecks immediately!"

The other men shifted uneasily, one of them grumbling something he could not quite make out over the sound of the rain, before at last Gilles bent down. The crew's initial reluctance to touch the half-dead man was not lost on Giancarlo, and even after they had dumped him on what had been the card table, no one said anything—just left hurriedly, muttering and shooting suspicious looks over their shoulders.

With a sigh—he would have to address their fears later, after the man had been tended to—Giancarlo turned toward his patient, lying as still and silent as marble on the table before him.

The man had some sort of thick harness strapped across his chest and for a moment Giancarlo wondered if he had been parachuting, if there had been an accident. But surely no one would go parachuting in this weather. He wondered how long the man had been out there, floating like limp seaweed among the treacherous waves. Could it have been hours? Days, even? He had heard stories like that before, of people who survived these kinds of extreme conditions against the slimmest of odds. Perhaps it was so with this man too.

When the harness finally slipped off the man's torso and into Giancarlo's waiting hands, he nearly dropped it in surprise. It was so heavy—deceptively heavy, even taking the many neat rows of mysterious pockets into account. Pausing for a moment, he felt a sudden compulsion to open the pockets up and see what was inside. But, no; his patient required his immediate attention. The harness and its contents would have to wait.

Reaching an arm around the man's back to turn him onto his side, Giancarlo's fingertips brushed across something jagged, an irregularity in the otherwise smooth expanse of the wetsuit's fabric. After checking the man's vitals to make sure that rolling him onto his stomach would not kill him, Giancarlo flipped his patient over and selected a scalpel.

The thick neoprene was difficult to cut, although he kept his instruments as sharp as possible; it was clear that the suit was very high quality, and probably quite expensive. So the man was rich, maybe. Or he had rich friends. It occurred to Giancarlo to wonder where the man's friends might be, and he resolved to listen to the radio broadcast as soon as he finished up here. There might be something about a search party. Maybe a missing yacht.

Then he peeled back the strip of wetsuit he had cut away and, sucking his breath in through his teeth with sympathetic pain, inspected the two bullet holes drilled into the man's back. Not an accident, then, parachuting or otherwise. This man had been abandoned, left for dead in the middle of the wide, cold ocean. No one around to find or help him even if he did somehow survive the gunshots. It was a thorough job. Giancarlo wondered why—what had this man done to warrant an execution? Or perhaps it really had been an accident after all, and whoever was responsible had panicked and thrown the evidence overboard.

Whatever the reason, he reflected as he rummaged through his tools, his patient was incredibly lucky—well, when it came to treating his injuries, anyway. The conditions had been optimal, the bullets self-cauterizing, mercifully remaining where they had lodged, and the icy seawater had cleaned the wounds at the same time that it had primed the tissue around them for immediate removal of the bullets. And the man was unconscious, which meant that Giancarlo would not need to administer any of the boat's supply of expensive anesthetics. A good deal all around.

Delicately, he extracted the first misshapen bullet from the man's back, stopping for one long uncertain moment to watch for any kind of stirring: a groan, a twitch, a flutter of eyelids. There was nothing. His patient lay as still as ever; if Giancarlo had not been able to perceive the slow, slight rise and fall of his chest, he would have worried that the man had died. Removing the second bullet, he hesitated once again to hold the small lump up to the dim light, squinting at it curiously. He was not familiar enough with guns to tell exactly what kind had fired these bullets, but he did understand it had to have been some sort of handgun. Gilles might know, he had been a sailor in the Navy at some point long ago. Giancarlo put them into a tin and set them aside. He would ask later.

He continued to cut away the wetsuit, piece by piece, checking to make sure there was nothing else that needed tending. He found no other fresh injuries, but there seemed to be a disturbing amount of past ones, which had since healed over into a network of pale scars criss-crossing the man's skin. Frowning, he studied a particularly wicked-looking scar that ran in one long clean swipe down the man's lower left arm—Giancarlo did not know guns very well, but he did know a knife wound when he saw it.

Growing impatient with the lengthy process of slicing through the stubborn layer of neoprene, he had resorted to simply tearing it with his hands when his attention suddenly snagged on a different scar. This one was on the man's hip, its shape and location too neat, too deliberate to have been the result of a fight or an accident. Looking closer, Giancarlo thought he could see the outline of something hard and metallic buried just below the skin, almost like a bullet but not quite, thinner and longer—but yes, there was something _in_ the man's hip!

Fascinated, he reached for a clean scalpel and made the shallowest of cuts, following the line of the previous incision; a tiny cylinder slid out in a bubble of blood. He held it up for a moment, turning it over and around, before moving to the leaky sink to rinse it off.

It was silver, with a single black band etched around the bottom quarter of the cylinder, as though it might split into two unequal pieces if he pulled on it, and there was a small red button perched atop the opposite end of the band. Or—no, not a button.

Absolutely perplexed, Giancarlo glanced over at his patient, still unmoving, completely unconscious. Why did this man have a laser-pointer surgically implanted in his hip? Giancarlo wanted to shake the man awake, show him the mysterious harness and the expensive bits of wetsuit and the strange little cylinder, and demand an explanation. Instead, because he was a good doctor, he took out his magnifying glass and contented himself with inspecting the cylinder on his own.

He made a mistake at first by turning the thin lance of light toward his eyes, blinding himself for one painful moment—oh yes, Giancarlo, excellent idea, very intelligent, he chided himself. Then, on a whim, expecting to see only a tiny dot of red light, he turned the laser-pointer toward the wall. To his surprise, there were words there, and a string of numbers:

_000-7-17-12-0-14-26  
Gemeinschaft Bank  
Zürich_

Shaking his head in confusion, he clicked the laser-pointer off and stared down at it, wonderingly, for an instant. The Gemeinschaft—he had heard that name before, the name of an important bank that served important clients. Clearly it was located in Zurich, and as for the numbers, well. It must be the man's account number, although Giancarlo could not imagine why anyone could not simply remember his account number instead of having it implanted into his hip.

Still deep in thought, he ambled back into the other room—and immediately halted, taking a single anxious step forward in alarm. The table was empty, except for his scattered instruments and a bloodied rag; his patient was gone, vanished. He had barely had enough time to register the man's inexplicable disappearance, however, when a strong hand gripped the back of his neck and spun him around, shoving him into the wall of the cramped room.

"What the hell are you doing to me?" the suddenly very awake, very mobile man demanded, fury twisting his voice into a growl.

"No, no," Giancarlo protested, whirling around just in time to see his patient stumble into the wall. He didn't have his sea legs yet, his wounds were still open, not bandaged, probably bleeding with the exertion, he was confused and in pain and very well might go into shock—he needed to sit down, to calm down before he caused either of them, perhaps both of them, serious harm, because clearly, Giancarlo realized in that awful moment, he was very, very dangerous.

He threw words at the patient urgently, trying to stop him, to soothe him: "It's okay, please, calm down, I mean you no harm, I want to help, I am helping you, look, I'm a doctor, don't you see?"

But the man merely gave him a blank stare, his eyes wide and wild, and lunged forward to wrap one deadly hand tight around Giancarlo's throat. The older man tried to worm away but the patient pressed his weight down onto him, so that Giancarlo was bent backward, trapped against the sink.

"What are you doing?" the patient yelled again, and the desperation in his tone was absolute.

Frantic, Giancarlo continued to mutter helplessly, the words just barely squeezing out through that unrelenting grip, until his patient spat, "Goddamn it, where am I?" and he realized at last through the darkening haze that the other man was speaking English, not Italian, to him.

"A boat!" The words burst from his constricted throat and, mercifully, the fingers around his neck loosened. "A fishing boat," he continued, seizing his opportunity. He raised his head up, now that he could, to peer into the man's confused face. "You were in the water. We pulled you out."

The patient shook his head, baffled, all of his terrifying anger suddenly gone. "What water?" he asked, looking around as though it might slosh out of one of the surrounding cabinets. His fingers kept loosening around the doctor's throat; he leaned heavily on Giancarlo now, his face covered with a thin sheen of sweat, the pupils of his eyes dilated with adrenaline. He was very close to collapse.

"You were shot," Giancarlo explained, "see? There are the bullets." He gestured toward the table, and his patient's head swung around obediently, confirming his story.

Then the man grimaced, groaning as his recent exertion caught up with him all at once. His hand slipped from Giancarlo's neck completely and the doctor had to catch him, steady him as he stumbled forward with the boat's pitching motion.

"Look," said Giancarlo, holding up the little silver laser-pointer, eager to keep the other man distracted so that that horrifying violence would not return. "There is a number for a bank." His patient grabbed for the tiny cylinder with clumsy fingers, inspecting it but clearly not recognizing it. "Why was it in your hip?" Giancarlo asked, curious, although he knew that the patient would have no answer at this point.

"My hip?" The question was more air than words, and his voice broke over the word _hip_. Exhaustion, Giancarlo thought. He had to move the younger man back to the table before he fainted, but he did not want to risk upsetting him all over again.

"Yeah, in your hip, under the skin," he insisted. Better to keep talking and wait for the man to come to him, so to speak. He braced himself, watching closely—any minute, now, the legs would give way.

"Uh," the man grunted, still gazing at the cylinder in his left hand as though it held the answer to some crucial, pressing question. He swayed dangerously, muttered a tormented, "Oh, God," and then there he went, tumbling forward into Giancarlo's ready arms.

"You need to rest," the doctor commanded, half-carrying, half-dragging the man back over to the table. "Wait. Please, slow down."

Setting his patient down on the table, he lowered his voice and calmly, firmly told the other man, "I'm a friend. I'm _your _friend. Huh?"

The patient continued to reel, panting. His eyes were closed with pain and he seemed unable to focus, but Giancarlo knew that he could hear him. It was critical that he establish that he was not a threat. He looked the patient directly in the face. "My name is Giancarlo. Who are you?"

Finally, a reaction: the man's eyes cleared, alert and intensely interested, but he seemed not to fully understand the question somehow.

"What's your name?" Giancarlo clarified. The man's eyes flickered back and forth between his face and the floor as though searching for the answer. He coaxed again, "What's your name?"

The patient let out a tortured noise and finally gasped, "I dunno."

He hesitated, appearing to lock onto the doctor's face at last, and a peculiar look came into his expression. Just like before, he muttered, "Oh, God." Then his eyes rolled back in his head as he passed out, sagging onto the table with a loud thud.

Blinking, Giancarlo stood shocked and silent for a long time, staring down at the unnamed, unconscious man. He was amazed, and not a little frightened, at everything that had just come to pass between them: a living corpse uprooted from the roiling surf, that fateful twitch of one hand to let them know he was still alive, two unexplained bullets, an intricate web of old scars, an account number to a bank in faraway Switzerland, the extraordinary violence of his awakening, the deep and raw confusion at the end.

As he bandaged the wounds on the man's back—open and bleeding, as he had suspected—and covered him with a blanket, a question lodged in his mind, spinning and spinning around in his head like a pebble caught in the ever-shifting tides:

Who and what was this man that they had hauled aboard their ship?


	2. Chapter 2

The rest of the crew awaited him in the cramped cabin. Someone had passed out cigarettes and everyone but Gilles was smoking nervously, exchanging guarded, sullen glances with one another. When Giancarlo walked in, Giovanni threw his hands up in mock exasperation.

"Finally!" he exclaimed. "Took you long enough. I can't get one laugh out of these guys."

"How is he?" Gilles asked, ignoring Giovanni.

Giancarlo removed his glasses in order to rub at his tired eyes. "Asleep now," he said. "He'll probably be out for the rest of the night, probably late into tomorrow, maybe even longer than that. We should do our best not to disturb him. He's exhausted and confused. He didn't even realize he was in the ocean until I mentioned water."

Franco's mouth tightened and he shot a challenging look at Gilles, who shook his head wearily. Giancarlo paused, watching the smoke spiral up from the men's mouths and hover, like some sinuous phantom, near the ceiling. He did not know quite how to broach the topic with them. Ghosts and demons, possessed spirits, vengeful angels—these were nothing that he believed in, despite the unwavering insistence of some of his uneducated peers that they existed, that their worlds, in fact, overlapped.

"Please," he said, glancing around. "Please tell me you are not frightened by old superstitions."

There was a momentary silence, and then Gilles stood and answered firmly, "Don't worry, Giancarlo. The issue has already been settled." He glanced over at Franco, his expression hard, and the other man shrugged and looked away.

"Franco?" Giancarlo prodded, and the crewman reluctantly met his eyes.

"Well," Franco mumbled, shrugging again as though it made no difference to him. "I suppose we couldn't just pitch him over the side, even if he is unnatural."

It was the best he was going to get. Nodding gratefully to Gilles, Giancarlo felt the tense muscles around his shoulders loosen.

"So?" Sergio asked in his usual terse manner. "Does he have a name, this seaman?"

Giancarlo stared at him for a moment, uncertain whether or not the burly man was making a joke. Pietro, looking back and forth between Giancarlo and Sergio, laughed then, amused by the scene; abruptly, the tension in the room broke and everyone relaxed.

Giancarlo shook his head, allowing himself a sheepish smile, suddenly wanting nothing more than to go to bed. "No," he told them. "It's one of the things he couldn't remember. We'll have to ask when he wakes up."

"What if he still doesn't remember?" Giovanni piped up. "We ought to give him a name just in case, what do you say?"

"I don't—" Giancarlo began, but Giovanni kept going.

"I say we call him Paolo," he said.

"Paolo?" Gilles scoffed before Giancarlo could intercede. "Too common. Give him something original, at least—Domenico, Salvatore, Luciano, something with a little flavor."

"What's wrong with Paolo?" Sergio protested. "My brother's name is Paolo, it's a good name."

Suddenly the entire crew was involved, roaring out suggestions, shooting down others. Giancarlo settled his head into his hands and willed himself to remain patient.

"Fine, fine," he interjected at last, cutting into a boisterous argument over the relative merits of Paolo versus Guiseppe. "Paolo it is, if he can't remember who he is by the time he recovers, which I'm sure," he fixed his companions with a hard glare, "he will."

"Ha!" Giovanni cried, slapping his thigh in delighted triumph. "There, you see, I had it right all along."

Giancarlo suppressed another smile. "I'm going to sleep now," he announced gruffly. "Gilles and Pietro, take the next shift, will you?"

As the rest of them shuffled off to their respective bunks, Giancarlo's thoughts returned to the unknown man sleeping quietly belowdecks. "Paolo," he muttered, snorting, just before he drifted off. "As if he doesn't have a name of his own."


	3. Chapter 3

The patient still had not awakened—had, in fact, hardly stirred from a deep, exhausted sleep, the kind a person takes the way he would take a long draught of water after a hard and hot day's work—after three days. But Giancarlo was certain that it would be any time now.

He had made sure that he would be present when the moment came. As he had explained to the crew, he was the only person on the boat that the patient would recognize right now, and the man would be disoriented and possibly upset if he opened his eyes to an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people. The doctor had neglected to mention the stranger's violent outburst during his makeshift surgery, or that he was afraid the man might react similarly if Giancarlo was not there to meet him, so to speak. It was a detail the others did not need to know.

And so it was that Giancarlo was present when the patient first spoke, very early in the morning on the fourth day, just as the sun's first shafts of light fell across the dirtied pane of the cabin's only window: "Who's that? Who are you?"

The doctor, who had been dozing on a nearby bunk, was suddenly wide awake and alert. Glancing over, he saw that the other man had maneuvered himself into a sitting position and was looking over at what must, in the dim light, be only a man-shaped lump. Moving deliberately, so as not to startle the man, the doctor swung his legs over the edge of the cot and sat up, bringing himself into the stranger's line of sight.

"I'm your friend," he said. "Do you remember?"

Though the man's face was shadowed in the dawn's gloaming, Giancarlo could _feel_ his gaze, intent, scrutinizing. After a moment, the patient said, "Giancarlo." His tone was assured; he seemed very calm.

"That's right. How are you feeling?"

"Weak, but otherwise functional. I'll feel the wounds for a while, though, and my left shoulder is stiff. Actually, my entire body is stiff. How long have I been asleep?"

The man had not moved at all before or during his response, and Giancarlo was given to understand that he had completed his physical evaluation well before awakening the doctor. Giancarlo made no comment about this realization, but he did file it away for later consideration.

"Three days. As you say, it will take some time to heal, but you don't need to worry about that. The crew wants to stay out at sea for another two weeks or so, as long as you're able." Giancarlo offered his companion a small smile. "It would cut into their wages, you understand."

The patient nodded. It occurred to Giancarlo that there was something very unnerving in the way that the stranger held himself so utterly motionless on the rough cot despite the roll and pitch of the boat, the way that he maintained such level and unwavering eye contact, the way that his expression revealed absolutely nothing of what he might think or feel.

The doctor held his silence for what felt like a very long time, but when it became apparent that the other man had no intention of speaking, he cleared his throat and said, "Well, you know my name. What's yours?"

"What?" The question emerged from the man as if by reflex.

"What's your name?"

The patient's gaze fell away from his doctor then; he leaned his head back against the wall and inspected the pale light at the window. For several minutes he stayed like that, very still, before turning back to the doctor. "I don't know."

My God, Giovanni was right, Giancarlo nearly exclaimed, but he stopped the outburst before it reached his lips. Instead, he said, simply, "That's all right." He stopped to think for a moment. "Let's try something else. How about—do you remember how you ended up in the water? Before we found you?"

No answer. No movement. Just the morning light shifting across the man's face, the blue of his eyes becoming apparent at last. He still appeared to be calm, but Giancarlo thought he could detect something in the other man—an underlying strain, perhaps, or even the beginnings of panic. The stranger looked down at his hands, curled into loose fists in his lap.

"You were shot in the back," Giancarlo reminded his patient. "Twice. What happened? You were ready for the ocean—your wetsuit was very well-made, and you were wearing—"

"—a dive harness, model number 4220-01-392-0301." The patient cut in as if he were in a dream, his voice so low he might be talking to himself. "Commercially available to divers throughout the United States, but more specifically approved and recommended for use by the US navy." He stared at Giancarlo without seeing him, puzzled. "I saw it...next to the table. When you pointed out the tray with the bullets."

Giancarlo drew in a long breath. The man had been bleeding, upset, possibly delirious at that point. "If all that is true, that's very good," he said slowly. "How—how did you know that?"

The patient shook his head. "I don't know. I just do. Just like I can tell you that…that, for instance, this boat was built sometime in the '50s—probably the early to mid '50s, if I had to guess. Based on my initial observations I'd say it was built in the UK. And I know that you have a crew of nine, one less than full capacity, which means that either you aren't turning the kind of profit you want or there's a crewman who isn't here. Sick, I assume, and a relative of yours, since you didn't hire someone else."

"Perhaps I am not the one who is in charge of hiring, though. What about that?" More than a little unnerved, Giancarlo used the question to cover his sudden wariness. The man was right about all of it: the boat had been built in early 1954 in the Irish harbor of Dingle; Giancarlo's father used to laugh about the city's name. And his nephew Antonio, only son of his younger brother, was not aboard because he'd come down with the flu just before they were set to sail.

"Maybe not, but if that's the case I'd be surprised," the stranger was saying. "You're the only doctor aboard and, although you're still quite fit for your age—you're what, fifty-seven? fifty-eight?"

"Fifty-nine," Giancarlo supplied.

The man gave a short nod. "As I said, you're fit but your musculature isn't that of a man who's hauling in the nets all day, every day. So that would mean, if you're not on the deck, you're in the navigator's cabin, a position that usually goes to the first-mate or captain. But since you're down here with me after three days instead of upstairs navigating the boat, it stands to reason that you're in charge, and have told your first-mate to take command for the time being."

In response to the stunned look on Giancarlo's face, the patient offered, "I can keep going if you want." And, despite the sheer insanity of it all, a small, lucid bit of the doctor was pleased to note the arch tone of the statement. So there is a person here after all, that bit thought. A man who takes pride in his ability, no matter how uncanny. It was a strange realization, oddly reassuring.

So he said, "Sure. Let's see what else you've got. You were right about our missing crewman, by the way—my nephew, Antonio, is sick at home."

The stranger regarded him with that signature intensity. "You're about six foot one, maybe six foot two, two-hundred and twenty pounds. You'd never start a fight, but you know how to end one. You trained at one point—a boxer?"

"Many years ago. Nothing formal, though, just a club sport at university."

"Not an Italian university, I think, nor British. You speak English very fluently, but it's the wrong accent. It must have been in Germany—western Germany, somewhere northern."

"Yes, that's right; I was in Bonn." Giancarlo's voice sounded strange in his own ears. He felt somehow detached from the conversation.

"I assume you studied medicine there. But something happened to prevent you from graduating with your degree, since doctors don't usually become fishermen. I'm guessing it was a death in the family—your father's, most likely, since the job is traditionally reserved for men. You had to come home and support the family." The man stopped, then, and took in Giancarlo's reaction. Something in his expression softened; where before he had been utterly focused, now he seemed uncertain. "I'm sorry. I've upset you."

"No." The word dropped from his mouth like a stone; Giancarlo didn't know why he said it. Truthfully, he didn't know how he felt. He corrected himself, "Well—yes. A little. But it's okay. I'm—I hope you understand me when I say I'm astonished. How did you know all that?"

For the first time since he'd awoken, the man looked helpless. He shook his head, and Giancarlo could read the frustration in the hard set of his mouth, in the tension of his fingers. "I don't know. It's like I said before—I just do."

"Well." The doctor didn't know how to respond, but anything seemed better than nothing. Than silence.

"It seems ridiculous that I can figure all that out, but I don't—" The patient clenched his jaw, swallowed hard. The emotion in the sheared-off statement was the first obvious sign that he might be anything other than collected. That he might be agitated. When he resumed his voice was firm and oddly uninflected. "I don't remember anything that happened before I woke up on your table four nights ago. How is that possible?"

Giancarlo shrugged distractedly, still somewhat disturbed but unwilling to admit to it. "Amnesia is very common in people who experience trauma. Don't worry. It will all come back to you soon. But for now, you need to rest. As your body regains its strength, your memory will follow."

Shifting himself to gaze up once more at the cabin's small window, the man murmured, "Amnesia." Like he was trying to make himself believe it.

"Yes," Giancarlo assured him as he stood to leave. "But you must rest now, okay? Call me if there is pain, or you need company."

The patient nodded absently, and Giancarlo abruptly understood that he would never receive any summons from this man—not for companionship, and certainly not for pain relief. As he exited, ducking through the cabin door, he tried to understand the implications of that knowledge.

Behind him, he could feel the patient's unasked question hanging in the air: _What if it doesn't come back?_

He shook his head. He had no more answer to that question than the patient did.


	4. Chapter 4

Eventually, both patient and doctor had to admit that, for now at least, the stranger's memory was out of reach. For lack of any other name, the crew called him Paolo, as Giovanni had suggested. Giancarlo didn't like it—all it will do is confuse the patient and make it harder for him to pinpoint who he really had been before his accident, he argued—but he had to concede the point that it was too difficult to leave the man without a name. Still, he tried not to use it if he could help it, instead referring to him by the amiable and rather fatherly nickname "my boy."

After his awakening, the patient remained abed for only three more days, and then he was up and about: exploring the boat, meeting the crewmen—who had noticeably relaxed when they saw that he was, indeed, just another man like them—and watching the work from the relative comfort of the main cabin. At first Giancarlo worried that the man was being dangerously rash, too impatient to care about his convalescence; but after stepping back and inspecting his behavior, the doctor realized that the stranger was merely testing himself, his body, his limits. Once he had established those limits, he would push just a little bit beyond them—never enough to risk re-injuring himself, but rather enough so that Giancarlo noticed a small but marked and steady improvement in his physical strength day by day by day.

Only once did the doctor make the mistake of attempting to check up on him, on the first day that the patient was up and about. Giancarlo had found him alone in the kitchen after the men had finished their lunches and gone back to their labor.

"All right, my boy, time to take a look at how you're healing."

The stranger turned to face him, leaning back against the countertops, arms crossed over his chest. He looked so casual, unconcerned, that Giancarlo didn't realize until later that the position had been defensive.

"I already checked," said the stranger. "It's fine."

Humoring him, Giancarlo smiled and approached, reaching out a hand. "Still, I'd just like to—"

His grip was firm around Giancarlo's wrist, a warning. "It's fine."

The doctor paused, met the other man's eyes. Then he relaxed, nodding his head—"Okay. Okay. I believe you."—and the man released him. For a moment both stood in tense silence.

"I appreciate your concern," said the man at last, "and all you've done for me so far. But I know a little bit about medicine, and would prefer to oversee the details of my recovery myself."

"Of course," said Giancarlo. "I didn't mean to impose."

Then the man gave a small, careful smile, and Giancarlo offered a nervous huff of laughter, and when they left the kitchen, both went separate ways.


End file.
